Paul and Lucy Spadoni periodically live in Tuscany to explore Paul’s Italian roots, practice their Italian and enjoy “la dolce vita.”
All work is copyrighted and may not be reprinted without written permission from the author, who can be contacted at www.paulspadoni.com

Sunday, November 16, 2014

When I received a traffic ticket while driving a rental car
in Italy in 2011, I wondered what would happen if I didn’t pay the fine. I read
advice in several online forums, but it was just that—advice. No one seemed to truly know
what would happen. A few people said they did not pay and nothing had
happened yet, but the bureaucracy in Italy works slowly, so I realized that
something could have happened later and the people just didn’t update their old
forum comments. I have now met a man who was ticketed in Italy about four and a
half years ago in Italy and didn’t pay. Mark thought the incident was long
behind him, but in the past year, he and his wife have been receiving
persistent calls from a collection agency in the United States.

Mark had received four ZTL (limited traffic area zone) tickets;
three were in Milan, all in the same spot, as he circled in a round-about
trying to determine which was the correct exit.

He did not pay the fines, reasoning that “it’s not fair to give tickets to
drivers who can’t read the signs or to give three tickets for the same
violation.” Mark didn’t even have to pay the car rental agency a fee when they
tried to charge his credit card. The bank called him and said that
someone from Italy was trying to charge his card months after his trip was
over, and he told the credit card representative that the charges must be
fraudulent, since he had not made any recent purchases in Italy. Then he had
his credit card number changed.

He realized when he received the traffic tickets in the mail that the attempt
to charge his credit card must have been related. Several times he received registered
letters sent from Italy, but he refused to sign for them, and they were
returned. When he hadn’t received any more communications from Italy for many
months, he thought the whole incident was behind him.

But a collection agency started calling earlier this year, sometimes
multiple times in a day, sometimes only fifteen minutes apart all through the
afternoon or evening. He usually didn’t answer the phone, and occasionally
someone at the agency left a voice mail explaining the purpose of the calls.
One time his wife did accidentally answer the phone, and she was told that the
agency would take legal action forcing her husband to appear before a
federal magistrate.

Mark is still not concerned, because even if taken to court,
he would ask for proof that he had committed a violation. “All they sent me was
a photo of the car license plate,” he said. “They have no photo of me at the
wheel.”

He also has heard that once
five years has passed, it will be too late for Italy to continue pursuing the
tickets and he will be completely off the hook. He does concede that it would
be wise for him not to return to Italy, at least until this five-year period is
up. “Otherwise,” he joked, “I might be joining Amanda Knox in an Italian jail.”
Not likely, since Amanda also has the good sense not to return to Italy right
now.Update, March 2017: Mark said: "Five years to the day the calls stopped. We haven't heard from anyone since . . . the courts or credit collectors. The next big test will be when we head back to Italy!"

Thursday, November 13, 2014

Earlier
this year, I posted a blog How
are the Spadoni families spread across the world related? explaining
that DNA testing could answer the interesting question of whether
various Spadoni families throughout the world are related. I am still
hoping to find someone else with enough interest in this question to
help me coordinate a formal family name project, but in the meantime,
there is nothing stopping any male with the Spadoni name to apply for
DNA testing. We can still compare results on an informal basis to see
if our families are related.

Thus far, only one person from
another branch of the family has responded and been tested. Florian
Spadoni, descended from the Spadoni family of Bigliolio, Italy, also
took a Y-DNA test at Family
TreeDNA this year. Unfortunately, a comparison of the results
indicates that we are not related. However, we can’t make a firm
conclusion based on the results of only two family members. We need
more male members of the Ponte Buggianese and Bigliolo families to
step forward and be tested. In fact, I welcome any Spadoni from
anywhere in the world to join in this endeavor. A Y-DNA test that
measures the recommended 37 genetic markers normally costs $169 (but
it sometimes goes on sale).

At
this point, little can be known until more people are tested, so I
can’t really say much about my own test results. I can say that my
haplogroup is J-M172, sometimes also referred to as J2. Family
TreeDNA notes: “Haplogroup J-M172 is found at highest frequencies
in the northern Middle East, west of the Zagros Mountains in Iran, to
the Mediterrean Sea. It later spread throughout central Asia and
south into India. J-M172 is tightly associated with the expansion of
agriculture, which began about 10,000 years ago. As with other
populations with Mediterranean ancestry, this lineage is found at
substantial frequencies within Jewish populations.” Other sources
state that people with this genetic footprint have ancient origins in
the area between the Caucasus Mountains, Mesopotamia and the region
just north of Arabia known as the Levant. According to Wikipedia,
“J-M172 is linked to the earliest indigenous populations of
Anatolia and the Aegean. The present-day ethnicities who have the
strongest amounts of J2 include pre-Arabised Mesopotamians and
Levantine peoples, Mediterranean/Aegean peoples, Greco-Anatolians,
and/or Caucasians.” Today, it is found in 9 to 36 percent of the
Italian population, depending on which region is being considered. It
appears to be particularly high in the Central Marche region, but I
couldn’t find any statistics that spoke of its frequency in
Tuscany.

Outside
of Italy, the countries with the highest percentage of people in this
haplogroup appear to be Chechens, Iraqis and Georgians.
Interestingly, Lela—my son Randall’s wife—is from Georgia, so
there is a decent chance Randall and Lela share the same haplogroup.
Thus, they could be, in the most liberal use of the term, related.

Florian
Spadoni, on the other hand, is from haplogroup L-M20, which is not
found in Italy as often. Strong concentrations of this genetic group
are found in southern Asian countries such as Pakistan, India and
Syria as well as some tribal regions of Turkey. On the 37 areas (or
markers) of our genomes that were tested, Florian and I had 11
identical sequences, which is a very low correspondence.

I
did have two other people who were identical matches, although these
people did not have as many markers to compare. Currently, genetic
genealogists recommend that anyone undergoing Y-DNA testing ask for
results from 37 markers, because it will result in more accurate
comparisons. However, many people who were tested in earlier years
only had 12 markers tested, including the two people who had results
identical to mine. They would need to pay an extra fee to get the
results for 37 markers. Probability charts show there is about a 90
percent likelihood that people with 12 identical markers have a
common ancestor within the last 24 generations. If either of these
two people would upgrade to 37-marker testing, we could state more
positively whether we are or are not related.

Neither
of my matches is named Spadoni (to protect their privacy, I will not
print their actual names). The first identical match is from someone
in Izmir, Turkey. Unfortunately, this person did not include any
contact information, so all I can do is know his surname and hope
that maybe someday he will contact me. The second person did include
his first name and his e-mail address, and I wrote him April of 2014
but didn’t receive a reply. Since his name was rather unusual, I
decided that I would try to find him on Ancestry.com and
whitepages.com and found that he lived in California, is 77 years old
and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1979. I will refer to him by
the name “Jacques.”

I contacted Jacques by phone last
week, and we had a short and interesting conversion. His family came
from “the Florence area,” he said, but he would not go into more
detail. His father immigrated to France in the 1800s, and Jacques was
born there; thus he has a French first name and an Italian surname. I
would have loved to ask him more questions, but he seemed hesitant to
provide more details.

Jacques said he had hired a company some
15 years ago to learn about his family origins, and they charged him
a lot of money and didn’t find out anything. He felt the company
had cheated him, which probably had something to do with his
reluctance to extend our conversation. Another reason may be that we
had different surnames, which indicates what genetic genealogists
refer to as a “non-paternal event”—most commonly an adoption or
out-of-wedlock birth.

This
is something I was warned about when I first read about DNA
testing—that it is possible that one may be unpleasantly surprised
with the results. Since Y testing faithfully follows the male DNA
trail, either Jacques or I may have an unexplained event in our
ancestry. I accept the possibility that it could be in my family
line, but I think it more likely is in his. I have traced my family
through church baptismal records to the 1400s. This does not preclude
the possibility of an extra-marital affair, but one has to wonder why
the professional genealogist Jacques hired couldn’t find anything
out about his family history. Of course, there is also that 10
percent possibility that we are not related, that our perfect match
at 12 genetic markers is just a coincidence.

This
is also a lesson in patience when it comes to DNA testing. Just as
pre-natal testing to determine the gender of one’s child before
birth was once rare and is now almost standard practice, so too will
DNA testing gain more acceptance and become commonplace in the
future. When Jacques had his DNA tested, he was one of the very first
to do so; thus it should have come as no surprise that nobody matched
his results—and then it must have come as quite a shock when he
received my phone call 13 years later (the testing company says it
launched DNA tests in 2001). Jacques had not received my e-mail, so
it is possible that the address he used has changed or my message
went unnoticed or did not make it through his spam filter.

Both
Florian Spadoni and I were disappointed to see that we didn’t have
more matches to our DNA tests, but we will just have to wait until
more people volunteer for testing. Genetic experts say that trying to
interpret one’s DNA test results can be like the sound of one hand
clapping until more people join the trend. Obviously not everyone
shares our strong interest in genealogy and family history, but
hopefully we will eventually see a few people in each Spadoni branch
who care about this enough to be tested.

----------------------------------------

Note:
Since posting this blog, I have been contacted by the person with
roots in Izmir. We are both puzzled by the genetic connection, since
he has no knowledge of his ancestors having traveled to Italy, and
vice-versa on my part. We hope to continue our research on this
mystery.

Also,
I have since had autosomal DNA tests at both Ancestry.com and Family
Tree DNA. This type of test reveals relatives on both maternal and
paternal sides, and I’ve made contact with many previously unknown
relatives. However, these tests can only predict relations back about
10 generations at best, so they are not adequate to determine if the
Spadoni families of La Marche are related to our extended Spadoni
family of the Valdinievole.

Saturday, November 1, 2014

May 2, 2014It was during a lunch of snails that I realized Lucy and I
were close to accomplishing our goals in Italy. I had earlier related to Suzye
how I had once encountered Ivo as we walked by his field. His hands had been
full of live snails, but—always outgoing—Ivo still stopped to talk to me,
sharing his plans to eat the snails later and giving details about how he would
prepare them and what other foods he would be having for dinner. As he spoke,
some of the snails slid out of his hands, and he had to stop to pick them up
while readjusting his grasp on the others.

I sample fried snails for the first time, with Suzye and Linda.

A few days ago, we were showing Linda and Suzye an old house
in San Salvatore that was for sale, and Suzye noted a mob of snails milling
around on the shady stones of the back wall. Recalling my Ivo encounter and snail’s
tale, she found a discarded tin pail and plucked up a dozen of the mollusks,
saying she wanted to look up some recipes and sample her first taste of escargot.
However, in reading online recipes, it turned out that making escargot is not a
simple process. Preparing the snails takes several days using a procedure that involves
flushing out their systems and feeding them herbs or corn meal before putting
them in salt to remove the slime. We didn’t have time for all this, so Suzye decided
to give them to Ivo instead.

We had recently met Ivo’s brother Celestino and his family.
In previous years, we had only met Celestino’s wife, Antonella. But about a
month before Suzye found the snails, I had seen Ivo out in his field and stopped
to show him my research that explained how he and I were related as fourth
cousins. As we spoke, a young man working across the field walked over to meet
us. Ivo introduced him as Matteo Seghieri, one of Celestino’s two sons. A few
days later, we were invited into Matteo’s house, where we had espresso and
biscotti with Celestino, Antonella and Matteo.

Linda with Ivo and his homemade wine.

While looking for Ivo to give him the snails, we saw his car
parked by his field, but he wasn’t in the field or his farm sheds. But by now,
we had realized that if Ivo’s car was parked by his field and he wasn’t around,
it’s because he was visiting his brother’s family in the Casone di Marcucci,
which is right next to his field. Sure enough, he was there, and Lucy, Linda,
Suzye and I had more espresso, this time with Ivo, Celestino and Antonella.
Lucy and I served as translators, and Ivo expounded on one of his favorite
topics, which is food from the cucina
povera—the poor kitchen—which he explained uses traditional ingredients
that can be found in the wild. Before we left, he had given us two bottles of
wine—one red and one sweet and white—and some cantuccini, a type of biscotti that he made from his own special
recipe. Even better, he promised that next Saturday, we would come back with
the snails, cooked in two different meals.

We waited around at the Casolare dei Fiori during lunchtime
on Saturday, and when he didn’t show up, we realized he probably expected us to
go back to Celestino’s house. Sure enough, he was there with the snail dishes,
and we took them home to savor together. One meal was snails fried in batter,
but Ivo had also deep-fried pieces of zucchini and broccoli, so only one bite
of every three was actually a snail. Linda, Suzye and I downed this course in
about five minutes, while Lucy, who has a more sensitive stomach, passed on
these delicacies. The other recipe was lumache
in umido, stewed snails, which we decided to save for a later meal.

And what was my impression of the snail meals? I loved the
fried zucchini and broccoli. As for the fried snails, I tried not to think of
what I was eating, which was difficult. The snails themselves had little taste;
the predominant flavor was that of the batter and oil, which I liked. But the
snails were definitely chewy, kind of like biting into a soft chunk of fat in a
steak. Because of the different texture, I couldn’t help but recognize when I
was eating a snail as opposed to a vegetable, and I think that spoiled the
experience. Perhaps if I had grown up eating them prepared this way, I would
have no problem, but I can’t say it is something that I will go out of my way
to eat again. As for the snail stew, we never got around to sampling it. We
told each other that we had just been too busy, and then we had waited too long
and it wasn’t fresh any more, but I think that if we had liked the fried snails
more, we would have made time to eat the stew as well. Sorry, Ivo, that we
wasted your time making it. Luckily, he doesn’t read English, so maybe he won’t
find out. We told him we really enjoyed the snails, which is true in the sense
that we greatly enjoyed the experience of finding them, talking to him and
eating them for the first time.

The outcome of this experience is that I came to several
important realizations. Because I had been learning Italian gradually over the
past four visits, I hadn’t noticed my improvement. I could see that even though
I still didn’t consider myself anywhere near fluency, I could now communicate
well enough to be invited over for espresso. I had once been at about the same
level of language ability as Linda and Suzye, but now I can translate for them.
I had wanted to make friends and find relatives in Italy and discover how we
were related, and now I knew very many, and I considered some of them friends
as well.

I also wanted to understand and appreciate my Italian
grandparents, who had grown up in this exquisite country but chose to leave
their homes so their children and grandchildren could have better lives. I
never met my nonna and hardly knew my
nonno, but I had come here to explore
the culture that had made them what they were. That culture has changed
dramatically from what it was when they left Italy 100 years ago, because now
my cousins are policemen, chemists, lawyers, professors, business owners,
dentists, hair dressers and employees at stores and factories. Those raised on
the farming life of my grandparents are either long gone or retired and on
pensions.

But it dawned on me as I munched on the snails that there is
one relative who still lives the life of a contadino,
a humble farmer like my ancestors before they immigrated in the early 1900s.
Ivo has been raised to embrace the old ways, and if I want to know the kind of
lives great grandfathers Pietro Spadoni and Torello Seghieri may have led, I
need look no further: Ivo is the very embodiment. He forages for wild herbs, vegetables,
mushrooms and snails. He raises and slaughters his own rabbits, chickens and
ducks and makes wine from his vineyards. His fields supply him with fruits and
vegetables and grain for his animals. Anything he can’t provide with his own
hands he finds at local open air markets, and he loves to work outdoors and talk
about his food and recipes.

I have come to San Salvatore for four winters now, a total
of ten months. Lucy and I can speak passable Italian. We have a few friends and
many acquaintances, and people recognize that we are part of the community. I
have found more relatives than I know what to do with, and I have traced my
ancestral roots back nearly 1000 years to this very street. We have decided
that we don’t want to move to Italy full time; we love our lives, our family,
our home in the United States. But San Salvatore called out to me almost
imperceptibly through the first fifty-five years of my life, and I finally
answered the voice inside of me. This place is also our home.

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About Me

First off, before you hassle me about our title, Lucy thought of it. Yes, I know some people may think broad is derogatory, but the etymology is uncertain and she doesn’t find it offensive, and it made me laugh. We have been married since 1974 and are empty-nesters now, which allows me to bring my submerged Italophilia into the open. We first came to live in Italy from February-April in 2011 and have returned during the same months every year. From 2011-2015, we lived in San Salvatore, at the foot of the hilltop city Montecarlo, where my paternal grandparents were born, raised and, in 1908, married. In late 2015, we bought a home in Montecarlo. We come for a variety of purposes: We want to re-establish contact with distant cousins in both Nonno’s and Nonna’s families, we want to learn the language and see what it is like to live as Italians in modern Italy, we like to travel and experience different cultures. Even if we aren’t successful at achieving these purposes, we love Italy and enjoy every moment here, so there is no chance we will be disappointed. I am grateful to God for giving me a wife who is beautiful, clever, adaptable and willing to jump into my dreams wholeheartedly.